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Today I received my Kodak DCS 620x (serial K620x-01196, 45134 actuations). Complete with charger, two Premium Plus batteries, camera power adapter, both camerastraps, a PC Card adapter and the original box (only manual was not included, but found that online). I was actually looking for a 720x or a 760, but I think I got a good deal: $324 (€ 231) including shipment! At least I have a charger etc, so the next camera I'm looking for is a 760 (and a E2/E3).
Luckely Customs was friendly to me, I only had to pay VAT. But that's no problem, since I can get that back.

Stupid enough, I forgot to bring some CF cards with me and lenses, so I have to wait till the evening before I can see what kind of photos it takes. At this moment, I'm a happy guy

Nice one, Bas.
You got a great deal, considering that all the stuff to power it was included.

I recently got a DCS 720x, and am similarly in that happy state.

What are you going to use yours for? Mine is delivering well on indoor ambient-lighting people shots. Early astro shots are promising too.

Thanks! I've read about your DCS 720x, sounds like a good deal too. One of the batteries seems to be bad, I'm getting an error while charging. It's ok, since the other battery is ok and I know that I can still get some other batteries on ebay. I have had no problems with the CF card, I've used a Sandisk Extreme IV 2GB. It's nice that I can format the card in the camera itself. Much better than with a DCS 420 or the Minolta I have.

Today I've made some snapshots (and the unavoidable self portrait I make as first shot of every camera) and every things seems to work ok:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/basdemeije ... 547630934/

I have to tweak the colors though, I have to read more at this forum and site. The photos are now converted with Adobe Camera Raw, which is as I understand not the best converter for these files. But for a first impression I'm happy with the conversion. The sensor needs some cleaning I saw.

I'm impressed by the sharpness, if I blow things up to 3000 pixels, the image is still ok. That surprises me.

Nevertheless I don't think I will use the camera for real work, it will be a camera for fun. I'm collecting some cameras I think they are interesting because of the technology used. But if I get a hand on a DCS 760, it's very possible some that I will use the camera for some occasions. It's fun to work with.

Tomorrow is my kind of day off, so I will play with the DCS 620x more I think.

Hi,

Use Kodak's Photodesk on the 'x' series units. It is programmed to get the colors a lot closer than anything else. You are seeing the effects of the CYM dye on the CFA (as opposed to the usual RGB dye).

Later!

Stan

_________________
Amateur Photographer
Professional Electronics Development Engineer

Hi,

I know Photodesk should do a much better job. But it doesn't run on OSX 10.7 and I don't have a Windows OS at the moment (why paying for a crappy OS ).

Hi,

You need multiple processors and OS. I have no trouble with having a CISC Intel with XP on one hand, a RISC G5 Mac with OS/X on the other hand, and a Sun Ultra with Solaris on my third hand!

As for cost, think eBay. IBM Thinkpad x31 series with XP. $100 bux or less. Makes a perfect portable photo processor with fast processing times for 620x shots!

I have three of the things. P4M, 1.6GHz, 2 GB RAM, 100 GB drives. Had them for a while, and don't think I paid more than $150 for any one of them. They even do a good job on the much larger 760c shots.

Those are neat, too, in that the bottom half (with the hot/swap bay) drops off and gives you a really small, thin and light portable photo processor.

Seriously, you will really need PhotoDesk to handle that CYM filter. I tried all sorts of other things, and they all work for some shots, and then not for others. You can go nuts processing one shot on six different programs until you get it somewhere near right - or you can process in PhotoDesk once and get it the first time. Kodak knew they were screwing up the colors with the CFA and then fixed that in the processing software.

What we really need is a Kodak Xena-Color processor plug-in for Photoshop, but we don't got one!

Later!

Stan

_________________
Amateur Photographer
Professional Electronics Development Engineer

When I moved to another town, I just got rid of a lot of computers (a.o. Windows and a Sun workstation ). Both my camera and my bicycle collection are already space consuming, so I don't know if I can get away with another collection Nevertheless, I maybe can get an old G4, which should do the trick I hope. I have to have the disks for OSX Tiger somewhere and some old versions of Photoshop.

I know that the Photodesk software is great. I remember it from testing the Kokak Pro 14n (and later de Pro SLR/c) for a photo magazine I''m writing for.

As said before, I won't use the DCS 620x a lot probably.

Most RAW converters are apparently based on Dave Coffin's dcraw engine. I've found that dcraw knows how to decode the DCS 720x files, and apparently knows how to handle the CMY colour array too...see http://mulebakken.net/div/dcraw/dcraw-development.txt :

However, at least one dcraw-based application I used (the otherwise excellent Deep Sky Stacker) just treated the data as RGB (the C pixels as B, the Y as G, and the M as R), so I got some weird looking colours. This must be be explained by the application not drawing on the full functionality that dcraw provides for CMY data. I picture the application waiting impatiently for the RAW matrix to be decoded, then seizing the pixels and driving off at top speed while dcraw shouts after it "Wait! I'm not finished yet! There's another step!!".

Ray